


Two Sides of a Fake Tin Coin

by perceived_nobility



Series: Impossible Object 'Verse [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Arthur isn't paranoid he's just logical just ask him and he'll tell you, Gen, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, ftm!Arthur, mention of ideated self-harm, teen!arthur - Freeform, trans!arthur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2015-03-10
Packaged: 2018-03-17 06:50:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3519488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written as a companion piece to Impossible Object. If you haven't read IO, here's what you need to know:</p>
<p>When he’s sixteen, Arthur steals $25,000, flies himself to Florida, and has top surgery.  Or, to put it more accurately, Arthur convinces his friend Rob to steal $75,000 by siphoning thousandths of cents off the dollar of ad revenue on a reasonably popular free internet radio station while he, Arthur, uses a not insignificant portion of that money to buy them fake ID’s and medical records, and two very real round trip plane tickets.</p>
<p>Eventually, Arthur is coerced into Project Somnacin by the US military. Eventually, he escapes. Eventually, he meets Eames and they go about the slow, jerky business of falling in love.</p>
<p>But for now, Arthur is sixteen. He's just left Rob on the bus home. He's carrying a bag with two shirts, one pair of sweats, three pairs of underwear, and a manila folder full of forged medical documents in it.  It's July in Chicago and after Florida, he's a little bit cold.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Two Sides of a Fake Tin Coin

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a companion piece to Impossible Object. If you haven't read IO, here's what you need to know:
> 
> When he’s sixteen, Arthur steals $25,000, flies himself to Florida, and has top surgery. Or, to put it more accurately, Arthur convinces his friend Rob to steal $75,000 by siphoning thousandths of cents off the dollar of ad revenue on a reasonably popular free internet radio station while he, Arthur, uses a not insignificant portion of that money to buy them fake ID’s and medical records, and two very real round trip plane tickets.
> 
> Eventually, Arthur is coerced into Project Somnacin by the US military. Eventually, he escapes. Eventually, he meets Eames and they go about the slow, jerky business of falling in love.
> 
> But for now, Arthur is sixteen. He's just left Rob on the bus home. He's carrying a bag with two shirts, one pair of sweats, three pairs of underwear, and a manila folder full of forged medical documents in it. It's July in Chicago and after Florida, he's a little bit cold.

 

His mom doesn’t ask him where he got the money for the surgery.She takes his bags and sets them in the kitchen and envelops him, wrapping him in her big, silky scarf.It smells of warmth and rosemary and it’s gentle on his back.“My baby,” she whispers into his hair, “You’re home.”

When Arthur was little, he lived in his mother’s scarves.There are pictures of them taped to the fridge: his mother standing outside the community center with a tiny Arthur stuck to her chest, wrapped in layers of gauzy cotton.Five-year-old Arthur running down the hallway, legs blurry and dark, flying a scarf behind him like a sparkling, sapphire sail.And on the side of the fridge, far enough back to disappear into the shadow of the wall, eleven year-old Arthur graduating elementary school in a glittery floral dress, hair ironed into waves, with his mother next to him.Her purple scarf runs around both their necks like a frame.He looks startlingly like her: bright dark eyes and crimped hair, heart-shaped faces made royal by the somber wooden paneling of the community center auditorium.The day he gets back from Florida, her scarf is orange, cross-woven with a crimson that makes it look like a wildfire or a sunset.The ends are fringed with tiny tin coins that tinkle when she reaches up to nest his head against her shoulder.  

The apartment sounds like it always does: creaky and leaky and loud, sound seeping through sheetrock.He can hear someone downstairs vacuuming, muffled voices from the Rodriguez’s TV from next door.The kitchen is still cramped and wallpapered with a pattern of comically large, faded vegetables.  

When he goes to his bedroom, his mom behind him with his bags, he finds his backpack exactly where he left it on the bed.His curtains are still half-drawn, slicing the weak light of a faraway streetlamp over his duvet.He sits on his bed while his mom putters around, taking things out of his bags and gathering them into a load of washing.  

He expected to feel different, he realizes.Better, maybe.Or maybe like a stranger, walking into someone else’s life.Rob told him once that he thought they might be changelings: faery children switched with mortals at birth.Arthur never bought that, and he doesn’t think Rob really did either. But, as he smooths his hands over the familiar pattern of his comforter, tracing the sweeps of fraying stitching with absentmindedly anxious muscle memory, he thinks that maybe he believed it more than he’d thought.  

“Hey little king,” his mom says.He looks up to find her hovering over him, wash set down carefully on the floor.He reaches up and wraps his arms around her neck, stuffing his face into the scarf.It hurts: a tight, pulling pain in his armpits.She folds around him, turning him to her as she sits next to him. Her hand goes back to his hair, smoothing down the cowlicks that have cropped up where he can’t reach high enough to brush them.  

“Where’s Dad?” 

“Work.”Her fingers find the scar he got when he was six, falling off the bed.“But they cut his hours again, so he’ll be home soon.”

Arthur nods.The medical binder is tight around his ribs.His mother is close and big and safe, her scarf like the sun.If it wasn’t for the stretching he feels when he raises his arms too high, he wouldn’t be sure that anything had changed at all.

 

“It’s called transition, dude, not transformation.”

Arthur crosses his arms.It hurts.He uncrosses them again, shoves his hands under his thighs.Rob’s sitting on the swing next to him, idly twisting in place.“I know that,” Arthur says.“I just. I dunno.It’s stupid.”

Rob shrugs magnanimously, kicks at the dirt.“My dad called me son without having to think about it for the first time after I got back.So I guess I shouldn’t harsh on the transformation angle.But so, what, you were expecting to come home and be a Real Boy?Maybe stark talking to crickets?Walk around on your own instead of being jerked around by an old puppet master dude?”Rob pantomimes a marionette.Arthur kicks him.

“I’m not Pinnochio, you asshole.”

Rob squints at him.“I dunno man, you look pretty wooden to me.You better tell a lie just to be sure.”

Arthur rolls his eyes.“Robert Mitchell Washington is a good friend and a decent person and not at all a rude, inconsiderate dick.”

“I said a _lie_.”

“I have fifty thousand dollars.”

“No dude, a _lie_.”

Arthur swivels on the swing fast enough that the chains clank.He and Rob freeze, like the sound might have alerted someone to their presence.The playground is deserted: it’s hot and muggy and summer vacation, and besides that there’s a game on.Still, Arthur whispers when he asks, “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.I kept the script running while we were away and it’s over a hundred k now.Like, way over.”

“Rob, what the fuck.”

“Awesome, right?Fuck dude, if we keep this up we can go to college no problem!You like Harvard, yeah?In the bag.”Rob pushes off, pumping with his legs until he’s swinging in big, lazy arcs.“I can take Rob Jr to the vet to get his eyes looked at.My mom can take some time off work to help with her arthritis.I can get Alicia and Abigail real Christmas presents this year, not shitty hand-me-downs or shoplifted stuff.Oh my god, we keep this up I can send _them_ to college!”

Arthur thinks he’s going to be sick.“No.”

“Why not?”Rob’s high enough that the cables go slack at the apex of each swing.Arthur imagines the shock to his scars each time he falls back onto the seat: stitches ripping out, stretching skin.He imagines their paper trail unraveling the same way, tugged by repeated withdrawals until it falls apart and leads some enterprising FBI agent straight to them.  

“We can’t keep using the fund.We’ll get caught.You need to shut it down.”

“No way.”

Arthur stands up, plants himself in front of Rob’s swing.Rob digs two new furrows into the tanbark as he brakes, hard.“Rob.We’ll get caught.We’ll get sent to _federal prison_.All the money will be gone.You won’t be able to put Ali and Abi through college.You won’t even be able to send them Christmas presents that aren’t from the fucking prison commissary.This fund was for top surgery and top surgery alone.Shut. It. Down.”

“Fuck you.This could get our families off food stamps.”

Arthur stares at him.“Take my half.Take my weed too, all of it.Sell that and keep the money.Whatever.Just shut it down.”

If anything, Rob looks angrier.“You’re an absolute asshole, you know that?It was your stupid idea in the first place, I just coded the fucking thing.Put my ass on the line for a fucking surgery I could’ve waited a year for and gotten for basically free.And the moment you could actually _help someone else_ with your fucking _fraud operation_ you stop it.”He pushes himself off the swing.Standing, he and Arthur are eye-to-eye.  

In one swift movement, Rob punches Arthur in the nose.  

Arthur crumples, hands pressed to his face.“Keep your weed,” Rob says, shaking out his hand, “And keep your half of the money.It’s for your family.Pay your rent with it or something.Selfish dick.”

 

A month after his surgery, Arthur picks up his violin again.Technically, it’s not his: it was lent to him by the lady upstairs, Mrs. Hodge, when he was eleven and looking for an instrument to play in the school orchestra.His mom, and then his dad, and then his grandma, took him to all the nearby music shops, but nowhere had a violin within his parents’ budget.Walking home from the latest store, his mother had wagged her scarf at him—the orange and red one, with the tin coins on the ends.“If these were real money, I’d cut them all off and buy you the nicest violin in the store.”

Word got around the building that Arthur needed a violin, and one Sunday morning Mrs. Hodge appeared on the doorstep brandishing one.It was orange and intact, shiny with polish.“It was my daughter’s, but she outgrew it.If you play badly, I’m taking it back.”Arthur practiced at school for a year before he dared play at home, scared she’d take it away from him if she heard him screeching the bow across the strings. 

The violin feels heavy now, as he tucks it under his chin.His elbows are gangly and long, flapping out to the sides like a duck’s wings.He plays a few scales, slow, careful, but the violin sounds like nothing but a yowling cat.The bow wobbles as his arm shakes with exhaustion.  

It’s a Tuesday morning, eleven a.m.He knows Mrs. Hodge is home.

She answers the door on his second knock, surprised, reading glasses held up to her face.She looks like a mountain in gray wool, big and indomitable.“Arthur!How nice to see you.”

Arthur holds out the violin on his palms, bow laid neatly beside it.He bits the inside of his cheek, makes sure to breathe deep and even so he doesn’t sob.“I know you heard me playing. Just now.So you can take this back.It’s OK.”

Mrs. Hodge leans against the doorway, making no move to pick up the violin.Arthur starts to tremble.He feels hot with shame and hurt.She obviously heard him; she’s told him she can hear him playing through the floor.Her pretending his amateurish caterwauling wasn’t ugly noise is just making this worse.He shoves the instrument at her.Mrs. Hodge pushes it away.

“Come with me,” she says, and gestures him inside.

She leaves him standing in her kitchen—neat, bright, looking like a still life with fruit overflowing in ceramic bowls—while she disappears down the hall.Arthur puts the violin on the counter with the bow lined up beside it.Eventually, she returns with a small book of sheet music.

“It was the bow that got in the way, wasn’t it?”  

Arthur nods.“I’m sorry.”

“My daughter transposed these for violin,” she said, handing him the sheet music, “She used to play them with her fingers, just plucking the strings.That might be easier for you than using the bow.You don’t have to extend your arms as much.”Arthur flips through the music slowly.It’s marked up with penciled cursive in a small, cramped hand.  

“I don’t think I’ll be very good at finger picking.”

Mrs. Hodge sighs and something about her seems to soften.He realizes she means to let him keep the violin.“Arthur, you’ve undergone a big change.Your body is different than it was, and it’s still healing.Don’t you think it’s fair to change the music, too?”Arthur can’t remember seeing her and not being afraid of her.She’s the tenant who leaves notes for other people to take out their trash and stop making noise after ten p.m.Once, he’d watched her shout down the garbage man for not lining the dumpster up properly in the alley behind the building.But now, she’s an old lady who’d given him a violin when he couldn’t buy one for himself, and one who is giving him music, too.  

 

August is long evenings and midday trips to the lake on the Red Line.Then it’s a long, eye-rolling argument with his mom about whether Arthur should buy a wheeled backpack for school so he doesn’t strain his chest.Eventually he wins her over by pointing out that a) the shocks of people tripping over a rolling backpack would be worse than just carrying things on his back and b) he has a locker, so his actual load will be pretty light anyway.He buys a new Jansport in navy blue and pays with some of the cash from his and Rob’s siphon fund.His mom doesn’t ask where he got the money.

When he leaves an envelope on the kitchen table to cover half their rent for September, with a note indicating how it’s to be spent, she doesn’t ask about that either.His dad asks, but he just shrugs and says he’s been saving up his sick leave, and that some of the guys at work donated their tips.

September is dark mornings and cramped trains and four-days-a-week mock trial practice after school.The fact pattern this year is a murder, a case of transferred intent.The defendant, meaning to smother an ex-friend they’d fallen out with, allegedly entered the apartment next-door and killed an unrelated college student.The pretrial motion was a fourth amendment challenge regarding the search of the defendant’s apartment after the alleged intended victim came forward.Arthur drills precedent on the train, bores Rob to tears with it when he comes over to watch reruns of Star Trek.

His first scrimmage is the Wednesday before Rosh Hashanah.It’s dress, because every scrimmage is dress, so Arthur brings his suit with him to school and ties his tie in front of a gritty, scratched mirror in the first floor bathroom.His jacket pulls tighter over the shoulders than it used to, which he attributes to his bimonthly Testosterone injections.But the lapels lie flat on his chest: not puffing up over a binder and breast tissue, but not sagging with their absence.He straightens his tie, slicks back his hair, studies himself.  

If he looks from one angle, he’s a criminal, the kind of slick mobster who shadows Chicago’s underpasses, with silenced guns and discrete bank accounts.He contorts his face into an Al Capone mug.Not a bad likeness.

If he faces the mirror straight on, he looks like the lawyer he’s playing, clean cut and forthright, sight for the blind eyes of justice.If he squints, he can see himself in ten years, passing his Bar, walking in to argue his first real case.“Arthur Lawless,” he says, jutting his chin out, “For the prosecution.”

In one future, he’s the defendant, on trial for two counts of fraud and one of embezzlement.His life narrows to the distance between the witness stand and the jury box, and maybe, later, to the length of a bed in a white-collar prison.He might be back in Florida.In another, he’s the prosecutor, putting himself away.He builds his case with his own paper trail, tracking the cash through Switzerland and a few sovereign Pacific Islands back to the code Rob had written.He calls Rob as a witness: Rob, who pled guilty to an accessory charge so they could take down Arthur.In the first future, he hates Rob for his betrayal.In the second, he doesn’t love him, or respect him for it.But he is grateful.

Rob’s coming to the scrimmage today, probably as a peace offering.Arthur knows he’s still mad about discontinuing the fund, but he also knows that Rob really could have waited a year and gotten surgery for cheap on insurance from his college.He knows Rob knows he couldn’t wait.He knows Rob’s heard him coughing in his sleep from the asthma that took hold of his lungs about a month after he started binding.Rob’s seen the fungal infection that spiderwebbed across his chest, red and angry and itching.Rob’s heard Arthur speak longingly of kitchen knives, of the clean, smooth cuts of fillets.

He looks into the mirror, tilting his head so he goes from con to council and back again.The debt he owes to Rob is deep and abiding like a taproot or a buried stone.He feels it like a weight in his chest, right behind his sternum.When he bound, pain would press there, clicking when he moved.Some bone pushed wrong, a floating rib misaligned, pressing in dangerously close to a lung.Now it presses out, filling him up and pushing him into the corners of his suit.Misery, transformed.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written at 2am and unbeta'd so, sorry?
> 
> find me on timblr: ( http://andropogonfalons.tumblr.com )


End file.
